A new guide explains how financial institutions can engage with the CBD COP15 process and push for an ambitious Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. The Finance for Biodiversity Foundation, founded by NextGreen and de Horde Advies, contributed to the guide together with other partners.
Picture: Sjon Heijenga
The decision support working group within the Alliance for Financial Incentives created a framework for developing a mix of financial incentives and other policy instruments for climate change adaptation. After two years of pilots and collaboration on financial incentives for adaptation, the partners closed the Alliance Financial Incentives during the partner meeting on June 8th. All three working groups were featured. The decision support working group, which NextGreen facilitates together with Stroom en Onderstroom, presented her final product: the ‘Policy Mixer’.
On 21 May, on the eve of the International Day for Biological Diversity, we welcomed 18 new signatories to the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge. The group of signatories has now grown to 55 financial institutions from 15 different countries. We celebrated this milestone during the Global Biodiversity Festival.
Since January 2021, Anne-Marie has been working as the community manager financial sector within Climate Proof Together (0.1 FTE). Within this network for and by professional ‘climate workers’, Anne-Marie tackles climate adaptation issues with financial institutions and their umbrella organizations. This builds on NextGreen’s previous work on the Analysis of Finance and Climate Adaptation. One of the first activities is organizing a lunch lecture on September 13th, 12-13 o’clock.
Thirteen different initiatives on ‘finance and biodiversity’ – a new overview now shows who is doing what. Together with the signatories of the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge, the Finance@Biodiversity Community, UNEP FI and PRI, we developed an overview of the main biodiversity-related initiatives developed for financial institutions. The overview document shows the topics that each initiative addresses, the activities and deliveries planned for 2021-2022, reports published, and contact information. This overview was launched during the 1 April webinar on measurement approaches.
Six months after the launch of the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge, the Finance for Biodiversity Foundation has been set up to support the call to action and collaboration between signatories to the Pledge. The Foundation provides an organizational structure, helping to speed up progress and collaboration on the commitments made in the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge.
One lesson of the past year is that it’s only by working together that we can get through a crisis. At NextGreen, we enjoy working with the dialogue method, as given to us by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.
For Buber, equality is an essential basis for productive cooperation. Dialogue is a key concept for him. In a dialogue, speaking and listening are in balance with each other and attention is focused on perspectives and responses. Through this interaction, the dialogue partners can connect to their deeper sources. Hidden wisdom can be discovered by speaking and listening together. Through the interaction and the process of searching for answers together, creativity is released and new insights can emerge that we can build on. The dialogue therefore becomes greater than just the sum of its parts.
Following our recent visual story ‘Finance and climate adaptation’, we thought it was time to update our earlier inventory ‘Financial incentives for climate adaptation’ which we published in 2018. We made the weblinks work again and added some new examples. As well as the visual story ‘Making the Netherlands more climate robust – what role do financial institutions play?’ in which we link to the inventory, the forthcoming model for decision support on financial incentives has also benefited from this update.
Together with the EU Finance@Biodiversity Community and the signatories of the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge, we have developed a Guide to measuring biodiversity for financial institutions. As the loss of biodiversity becomes ever more urgent, financial institutions are looking for ways to quantify the impact of their finance and investment activities on biodiversity. The Guide on biodiversity measurement approaches provides a comprehensive overview of the biodiversity measurement tools that are currently in use and underway. The Guide will be presented in a webinar on April 1st, 2-3pm CET.
A new visual story about climate adaptation highlights the opportunities for collaboration between financial institutions and the public sector. Based on 20 interviews with financial institutions and public sector bodies, we analysed the role of financial institutions in climate adaptation as part of our Finance and Climate Adaptation project. We have now delivered the final product: a visual story that highlights the actions that financial institutions can take to make its assets in the Netherlands more climate-proof, and how they can optimize their collaboration with the public sector.
